Thoughts from a Conservative point of view in regards to technology

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Altiris AAC Training

Recently, in other words it’s been a couple of weeks and I haven’t updated my blog in awhile, I attended the AAC Bootcamp that Altiris offers. For those not in the know, AAC stands for Altiris Authorized Consultant.

It is called a bootcamp for a reason. The class is long and hard, I’ll be honest. The class is really 2 and 1/2 days of PowerPoint death. I don’t know how many slides I actually saw, or even tried to count. All I know is that I took over 8 pages of notes each day. The best part was the fact there was lots and lots of coffee available to keep me awake.

The class focuses a lot on the “soft skills” of consulting, specifically how to present to different levels of people, including the CIO. Also you will learn a lot about how Altiris expects jobs on Altiris paper to go. What documents not only will you receive but also what documents you will give to Altiris and the customer. Also what type of meetings you will schedule and have including the Pre-Enagement, Post-Engagement, Whiteboard, etc..

All of these documents will be required to be presented in the final group project.

After class and dinner I would read the book and the notes I took to prepare for the quiz in the morning. Oh did I forget to mention quizzes? Yes there are 3 scores built into your final grade. 1/3 for quizzes and the exam, 1/3 for group presentation and finally 1/3 for the individual portion of the presentation.

The group project started on Wednesday and we were split into groups and handed a statement of work and about 40 other pages of data. Given sometime to look through the documents and then question the “company.” This would then provide us background for the rest of the work and is a very important part of the exercise, please don’t take this lightly as everyone in the class could have done a lot better at this.

Once the question and answer time is done, the rest of the time is group time and you create a group presentation and all of the documents that were covered in the class. This will take all of the afternoon and well into the early morning. Also on Thursday you will spend until noon practicing and finishing everything else up.

Good luck w/ the presentation it’s a huge part of the grade.

Finally cram for the exam and pass it on Friday

After everything is done you will be given your grade and critiqued on your performance during the week and during the presentation.